My dad told me an interesting story today.
A husband had a wife who would always cut off both ends of a sausage before cooking them for breakfast. When he asked her why she wasted perfectly normal pieces of meat, she simply mentioned, “I’m just following what my mom alway used to do.” Later that year during an extended family dinner, the husband watched his wife’s mother prepare sausages in the kitchen and noticed the primary removal of both ends of the sausages. Again, he asked his mother-in-law why her and her daughter would waste these pieces of meat. And once again, the answer was the same. “I’m just following what my mom always used to do.”
Curiosity got the better of him, and the husband decided to call his wife’s grandmother to ask why exactly this tradition had been passed down for so many generations. He called the grandmother, asked her the same question and received the following response. “Oh that tradition? I only cut off both ends of the sausages so that they would fit in my pan since it wasn’t big enough to hold a full sized sausage.”
Sometimes we blindly follow traditions and beliefs without truly understanding the reasoning behind them.